"Donald Moffitt - Mechanical Sky 1 - Crescent in the Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moffitt Donald)

where it was; his first thought was for the bright twisting shapes of the gene assembly displayed above the
lab bench.
He gave a groan. It was ruined. Even from the pseudoimage with its computer-assigned colors, he could
see that it was a hopeless tangle. The passenger gene had come unstuck and at-tached itself to a section of
an inverted repeat sequence on the wrong strand of the heteroduplex he had created that morning.
He shuddered to think of the consequences if a clone with a hidden defect ever were allowed to come to
foal. He was work-ing with genetic material from the Emir's prize stallion. The Emir tended to take a
personal interest in the offspring of his beloved al-Janah, the Winged One.
Knowing that it was hopeless, he punched up the magnifica-tion and called for a schema to confirm the
bad news. The com-puter obliged with a color-coded abstraction that showed the sequencing of base pairs
on the offending palindrome as a series of little plugs and sockets. The replication fork was busily zip-ping
itself up to the end of the moleculeтАФa repeat structure gone wild.
Hamid-Jones flushed it all away. He was going to have to do it all over again, from scratch. Wearily he
began assembling the components of another plasmid from the DNA fragments he had in storage.
"Ya Abdul, why so serious?" a voice said from the door. "Coming to tea?"
Hamid-Jones looked around. It was Rashid, from the protein assembly section. Like himself, Rashid was
descended from mawali, or "client" forebears, and it showed in Rashid's sandy hair and boiled complexion.
Hamid-Jones, on the other hand, might almost have passed for a pure-blooded ethnic ArabтАФwith his
hawklike visage, deeper coloring, and fierce dark eyesтАФbut he was painfully aware of his origins. Like it or
not, he was an Anglo-ArabтАФforever to be known in the social scheme of things as an 'arab al masta
ariba, "one who becomes an Arab." He was not as low on the social scale as the ubiquitous dhimmi, or
unbelieversтАФwho nevertheless enjoyed perfect tolerance as long as they paid the jizza, or head tax, of the
unconvertedтАФbut he would never achieve the status of a true Arab of tribal descent, an 'arab al' ariba.
He would always have to work harder to get ahead.
"No, I'll skip tea today," he told Rashid somewhat brusquely. "I want to finish this."
He bent over the workbench again, a rather ordinary young man in cheap shirt and trousers, with a
headcloth that was care-lessly askew. Hamid-Jones's six feet two inches would have been considered tall
on Earth, but he had already completed half his growth when his parents had emigrated to the Martian
Emirate, and as a consequence he was a head shorter than most of his Marsborn co-workers, and had
heavier bones and musculature. Strength, he had often had cause to notice, was not as important in the
world as height; it was eye level that counted. There was still a trace of the British Protectorate in his
Arabic accentтАФ another factor setting him apart.
Rashid did not go away, as Hamid-Jones had hoped. He lin-gered in the doorway, his eyes straying alertly
to the screen. "Let it go, whatever it is," he said. "It can't be that important.''
Hamid-Jones reached up and switched to a muon-scope view in uninformative shades of gray. He went
on working without replying. After a moment, Rashid tried again.
"Who's it for?" he asked slyly. "Not a falcon or saluki for someone in the palace, is it? That would be a
terrific plum."
"It's a horse," Hamid-Jones said unwillingly.
"Ah, a horse. Very nice." Rashid's oily gaze shifted to the sealed cryocontainer that Hamid-Jones had
neglected to stow out of sight.
"I'm giving it a third lung, like that mutation that cropped up in the Horse Guard stables."
Rashid pounced immediately. "Ah . . . but you're working with sequestered material, I see. That means . .
."
Hamid-Jones clammed up. "You'd better get going if you don't want to miss the tea break."
"As you like," Rashid said with a shrug. "Ma'al salaama." He left, the envy plain in his eyes.
Hamid-Jones set doggedly to work once more. Rashid would be spreading gossip in the canteen, but there
was nothing he could do about it. The assignment was a plum, and he had no intention of shirking it. The
Clonemaster, the esteemed Hassan bin Fahd al-Hejjaj, was grooming him for higher thingsтАФthere was no
doubt about it. There had been other tests before this one.